who where what?
My view of Delft
Since October 2008, I work in biophysics as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Nynke Dekker, in the new department of BioNanoScience at TUDelft (Delft, The Netherlands). In this multidisciplinary environment, we study biological systems at the single molecule level. My role has been to design, build and make functioning a new type of optical tweezers with torque control, to better study the physical properties of bio-molecules like DNA or RNA, and their interactions with proteins. The setup is now ready and starts producing data. Still a long way to go, but already a great satisfaction!
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B208
Before working in biophysics, I spent two years in Colorado working in the group of Jorge Rocca, at Colorado State University. There I worked in a big optics lab, where we developed new compact sources of coherent light (i.e. lasers) in the EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) / soft-X ray part of the spectrum (tens of nm). Being coherent, these sources can be used for interferometry in high resolution microscopy, important step in the next generation lithography process based on EUV, which should keep up with Moore's law.
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Scientifically speaking, everything started for me in Nice (France), where I spent the last part of my undergraduate carrier (based in Milan, Italy) and where I got my PhD in Physics in 2006, at the Institut Non Linéaire de Nice (INLN), directed by Jorge Tredicce. I worked there with nice non-linear effects in optical systems, like the dissipative self-sustained "light bubbles" called Cavity Solitons in semiconductor lasers. Here, other than optics, I learned the importance of complexity in non-linear systems, how chaos can be deterministic and why some attractors are strange (all of which I find in the amazing chaotic system called Barbara).